We are excited to announce the start of our validator operations on Babylon's Bitcoin Staking Protocol testnet.
Babylon is built on the Cosmos SDK and leverages Bitcoin's security to enhance Proof-of-Stake chains. Developed by Stanford researchers and Layer 1 developers, Babylon uses Bitcoin for trust and timestamping, improving the security of smaller blockchains without compromising on autonomy.
Babylon supports Bitcoin staking, optimized unbonding period, bootstrapping new zones, transaction protection, and censorship resistance. Its architecture, incorporating Bitcoin and IBC for checkpointing, boosts security for consumer zones and applications, making it a pivotal solution for blockchain ecosystem security.
Amongst its core functionalities, Babylon reduces unbonding periods from 21 days to 5 hours, bootstraps new zones with low token valuation, provides much-needed protection for high-value asset transfers across bridges between PoS chains, and allows transactions that are censored to be backed up in the ledger. Babylon also offers core primitives and protocols that use timestamp information to realize these use cases, ensuring maximum security for the blockchain ecosystem.
According to Babylon’s official forum, the network consists of three components with two levels of checkpointing, including Bitcoin as the timestamping service, the Babylon chain as the middle layer, and other consumers of security. The Babylon chain aggregates the checkpoint streams of many consumer zones and receives checkpoints from the consumer zones via Inter Blockchain Communication (IBC). To prevent an attacker from timestamping unavailable data, the chain also checks whether data is available behind the checkpoints of the consumer zones.
Explore Babylon Further
For those interested in exploring the technicalities and potential of Babylon, we encourage you to visit their GitHub repository: Babylon GitHub. This repository is a rich resource for understanding the depth and scope of what Babylon offers.
Stay Updated with Stakin
Follow us on Twitter at @Stakin for the latest updates on how we're contributing to Babylon’s journey. We are committed to keeping our community informed and engaged as we embark on this exciting new partnership.
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